Stewart Copeland has won a Grammy, been inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, written books, made films, presented documentaries and composed music for ballet, opera and classical concerts. Now the former drummer with The Police heads out on the next part of his spoken-word tour.
This is the second leg of your Have I Said Too Much? tour, its first run having taken place last Autumn. How will this one differ?
Every night is different. I could talk for five hours instead of just a couple, so it’s inevitable that no two shows will be alike. Regarding The Police alone there are twenty anecdotes that I could tell, so we have a lady MC, Lisa Thomson, to keep me on track because one question from the audience is all it takes to get me going for half an hour.
Is the tour called Have I Said Too Much? because you’re a bit of a rentagob?
[Feigning indignation] How dare you? No, I’m kidding – you don’t even need to rent me, I’m a freegob.
There’s a book about you, also called Have I Said Too Much?, that you describe as “a biography of sorts”. What do you mean by that?
It’s a biography with all sorts of insight that comes from its scurrilous author [Johnny Morgan], a guy who pretends to be an old friend of mine from within the clouds of hashish that enveloped him at the time. In that sense it’s semi-authorised.
How did it feel to read your life story through the eyes of another?
I’ve been doing that for the last fifty years.
Let’s rephrase the question: was it accurate?
Yeah. Pretty much.
The book paints a somewhat uninspiring picture of your pre-Police time in Curved Air, described as “a mid-level prog band”.
Did he call us that? I didn’t notice it. That’s completely unfair. I will have the book recalled and pulped. No, we were not a stadium act, more of a Polytechnic or City Hall act, but Curved Air burned down the house every night. Sonja [Kristina, vocalist and Copeland’s former romantic partner] gets up there on stage and shit’s gonna happen.
The book also relates one of those so-called ‘sliding doors’ moments in life. When you called music journalist Phil Sutcliffe to get a phone number for Sting, he refused to give it. Had you not cunningly rung back when Sutcliffe was out…
[Interrupting] I didn’t know that Phil wasn’t home, and it wasn’t part of some plan, I just rang again to yell at him: “Give me the number, asshole!”
Anyway, his partner gave you the phone number. Otherwise this conversation very probably wouldn’t be taking place.
That’s absolutely true. I’d have gone on to become a dentist or something. Maybe a tour manager. That’s one of my favourite stories from the book.
Here’s another ‘what if?’ moment. During the earliest days of The Police, you and Sting had such a good time playing with ex-Gong bassist Mike Howlett that you could have gone down that path instead.
I didn’t think of it that way at the time. It’s only now, looking back, that I’m amazed Sting and I stuck together through thin and thinner with no material. We didn’t have Message In A Bottle or Roxanne, just the crap songs that I’d written, things like Clown’s Revenge. At that point we had nothing. We were a fake punk band with no prospects. It was that day with Mike that reminded Sting of his purpose on this planet, which wasn’t listening to a bunch of blarney from an American guy, but to make music.
Do you still secretly listen to a bit of prog?
Yes I do. A good example would be Hawkwind. Back in the seventies I roadied for a band that supported them, and they were crap. Decades later I realise that they were actually a groundbreaking, interesting band. I never would have guessed from having seen them live.
You have a new album on the way.
Artefacts From The Vault is one of several that I’m concocting. As implied by the title, I’m delving through some music I made up that fell off the table up to twenty years ago, and some of it is very cool.
It happened once, against the odds, so could The Police reunite again?
Those odds are slim. We are enjoying life – and each other – too much away from being in a band together. Why jeopardise it by going back into that place where we shout and scream at each other all of the time? I understand now why we did that, because we had band therapy, and I know it’s because the three of us were put on this planet to make different kinds of music.
So, were you to walk into a bar and Sting and Andy both happened to be there, sitting in separate corners, would things go peacefully between the three of you?
Oh yeah. The three of us would end up in one corner right away. [After a moment of Machiavellian contemplation] Or maybe I’d go over into Sting’s corner and gripe for a while about Andy and then head into Andy’s corner and gripe to him about Sting. Because you know damned well that before I got there, their heads were together having a good ol’ gripe about me.
Have I Said Too Much? begins in Southport on September 24, with Latin American dates set for December. For dates and tickets, check Stewart Copeland's website.
